


Wrap You in Angels

by novelogical (writingmonsters)



Category: The Alienist (TV)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Abuse, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-19 03:37:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19348714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writingmonsters/pseuds/novelogical
Summary: Laszlo tells John he does not have wings. It is easier than admitting the truth.





	Wrap You in Angels

**Author's Note:**

  * For [misanthropiclycanthrope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/misanthropiclycanthrope/gifts).



> Title is from the Martyrs & Poets song "Lullaby"

John only ever asks once about his wings.

“Why do you hide them?”

It is early December, the sunlight grey and glittering off fresh-fallen snow beyond the windows of their shared apartments on the edge of Harvard’s campus. They could not be more different. John slumped in the thick armchair with a drawing pad balanced on his knee, all insouciant grace and blue jay’s wings trailing on the floor to either side. Every so often his eyes flicker up from the paper and the scratch of charcoal pauses, examining Laszlo who sits stiffly at the letter desk, hunched over the chaos of papers, his left hand scribbling furiously with the wasted right arm servicing as a paperweight.

The question startles Laszlo, not enough that John notices -- but he flinches. His pen stills. “What do you mean?” There are answers, explanations and excuses, that rise immediately to the tip of his tongue.  _ Don’t ask me. For God’s sake, ask me anything but that. _

“Your wings.” With a gesture of his pencil stub, John closes one eye and traces the curve of Laszlo’s spine through the empty air. “You never air them.” The sketch of Laszlo at his desk, ostensibly a study of anatomy, seems strangely small -- bare -- without a wingspan for balance. “It’s become fashionable to air them. There are studies that claim it to be good for one’s health, even.”

Still, Laszlo does not risk looking up from his notes. The sharp slant of his penmanship swims before his eyes. What can he  _ say _ ? A sharp pain, high in his right shoulder; mocking.

Of course, there are several schools of thought on the matter of wings that have made their circles through the New York elite, all of them contradictory. Wings ought not to be aired in the general public, especially women’s. Humanity should embrace their wings, air them as they please, ornament them. 

The wings are functional. They are fashionable.

A gift from God. An aberration.

“Have you read these studies?” Laszlo asks, for want of something to say -- something to needle John over. To draw away the sudden attention, the scrutiny.

Laszlo has read the studies. The religious treatises and anatomical texts and analyses, even the society articles on wing coloring and ornamentation. 

"Well, no," John balks, guilty. "But I read  _ about _ them."

"Hm." Unsurprising. Laszlo lifts his shoulders in a crooked shrug -- too casual -- eyes sliding away. "While I do not see what concern it is of yours, the fact of the matter is that I neither air nor tuck my wings, because I have none."

“What? But that’s --”

Laszlo hates to draw attention to it, hates the weight of every stare that traces the withered line of his arm, but it is the least of the evils here. “The result of my congential defect, you understand.” He irons his mouth into a grim line, unwilling to say any more about it. “If I was meant to have wings, they failed to develop.”

Chastened -- guilty -- John asks nothing more. He folds his wings close, tucks them tightly along the line of his spine, ruffling the blue and black plumage.

It is this supposed truth that he shares with Sara, years later, in the privacy of his grandmother’s garden. He has never met a woman so fierce, so damnably stubborn, as Sara Howard, and her white swan’s wings stretch and shiver furiously when she insists on pressing too hard on half-healed wounds, plumbing the depths of Laszlo Kreizler’s history.

“You’ve seen his arm, Sara,” he protests. “It’s the same --”

“It isn’t though.” And, burning with righteous fury -- at Laszlo and his knack for peeling them all apart with his unbothered, clinical detachment, at John for his staunch, insistent defense of the bastard, at the  _ lies _ \-- she digs into her pocketbook, coming up with the scraps of truth she has unearthed. Newspaper clippings. “Read this,” she insists. “Thirty years ago, written in the  _ Times _ . And… just look.”

_ The evening was highlighted by young Master Kreizler who dazzled all with his interpretation of Mozart’s Concerto for Piano No. 20 in D Minor _ . 

“What the devil are you getting at?” It means nothing; it can’t. He has listened to Laszlo pick away at the ivory keys on more than one ocassion, his good left hand flying fast and precise along the keyboard. “He’s played piano for as long as I’ve known him, in spite of his disability. That doesn’t mean…”

“The concerto requires two hands, John.” Sara’s jade-pale eyes are wide, her words ominous. “Whatever Doctor Kreizler has told you, the defect in his arm was not congenital in nature. In eighteen-eighty-six he had the full use of both limbs. If he’s lied to you about that, what else is he hiding?”

Six weeks later, in the drawing room of 283 East 17th Street, Laszlo confesses to the sins of a father. He has to steady himself against the mantel, voice cracking when he tells them both of the violence that was done against him. 

Sara listens, her eyes luminous with tears. 

John closes the space between them, folds Laszlo -- unresisting -- into his arms and whispers soft apologies, gentle reassurances.

For all that he has confessed, Laszlo still says nothing of his absent wings.

It is not so uncommon, after all, to have been born wingless and Laszlo has the case studies filed away in a desk drawer to prove it, will subject himself to the stigma of winglessness if need be. And, it may be  _ fashionable _ to air one’s wings, but there are many who still tuck them; it is easy enough to pass.

That should be the end of it.

Laszlo has no wings and a badly broken arm and it doesn’t matter. None of it matters to John, because for all of his flaws -- stubborn, sharp-tongued, bitter as cyanide -- he is  _ Laszlo _ , and John loves all the keen, curious parts of him endlessly.

It is fondness that sees him mounting the stairs to the Kreizler Institute three weeks after their investigations have concluded. Japheth Dury, dead. The stumps where wings ought to have been poking bony and ragged from the back of his shirt -- leaving bloody swathes carved into the backs of fledgling boys stolen from mollyhouses. Laszlo has disappeared into himself again, is doing everything in his power to numb himself with relentless work, and John is prepared to drag the man out by his collar if it means a few minutes of peace together, a lunch at Delmonico’s.

Instead, he is met in the foyer by an unholy tirade of shouting -- a language he does not recognize. A teacher and a pair of teen-aged aides shelter downy-feathered fledglings beneath their wingspans, herding the collection of wide-eyed little ones away from the raised, furious voices.

John quickens his pace.

“ _ Nem tudom, miért hozná ide  _ \--”

“ _ Apa _ !” A childish voice, sobbing. “ _ Apa, kérem _ .”

“Your daughter needs a doctor.” Laszlo. The sight of him stops John short as he rounds the corner; a little girl cowering behind his legs, fingers fisted in the alienist’s suit coat, and Laszlo all bristling with rage. 

“She is  _ possessed _ .” The man half-wild, desperate in his anger. “ _ Betegek a démonoktól _ \-- there are demons!”

“ _ A démonok ezt nem tették _ \-- there are no demons!” Laszlo’s soft face contorts instantly, hard with rage, and John has never seen him so dangerous; such darkness on his brow and such unbridled, terrible wrath in his hoarse voice. “This is not the work of God or of devils -- Natalia is epileptic!”

The father -- John is sure he must be the father, has seen this too many times before; Laszlo defending his charges from furious, frightening parents -- hurls epithets in Hungarian, in English. Snatches up a discarded child’s toy and throws that, too. 

Pressing her face into Laszlo’s knees, the little girl shrieks.

There is too much noise, too much rage built up in the containment of the foyer -- John sees the dangerous, terrible flicker. And Laszlo loses control.

“ _ You will leave this Institute at once _ .” A voice like thunder. A pair of crow’s wings, black as pitch, unfurling at Laszlo Kreizler’s back to fill the foyer, blotting out the lights. A devil himself. An avenging angel. 

John cannot believe what he is seeing.

It must be some trick; a clever illusion concocted in Laszlo’s fathomless mind. But the sheen off the primaries is too real, the way the feathers rustle and ruffle with agitation. John pays no attention to the man who stumbles past him, stinking of drink and babbling threats and curses as he flees. He is too shocked -- frozen by the sight of beautiful, fearsome Laszlo looking like a fallen angel. Like Judgment Day.

_ The fact of the matter is that I neither air nor tuck my wings, because I have none. _

He had lied.

The silence in the room -- still ringing with the echoes of danger and heated argument -- is deafening. Hollow. Laszlo sways on his feet, dizzy with pain and unaware of John only a few feet away. The little girl in her blue uniform smock sniffles quietly.

“Gitta.” Laszlo’s voice is hoarse, drawn tight with pain. Distant eyes cast about for the little girl, his good left hand groping for purchase on her thin shoulder. “ _ Minden rendben? _ You are all right now.  _ Drágám _ , go find Mrs. Fairfax, yes? She will look after you.” 

She goes; risks one glance back at the doctor with her dark eyes wide and wet.

And John sees the brilliant sheen of pain that crosses Laszlo’s eyes, the brief, terrible moment when the alienist catches sight of him -- mouth agape -- in the doorway. Laszlo manages a half step forward. The unsteady span of his wings flexes, balancing.

Laszlo sees white.

The ragged, brutal scream wrenched from somewhere deep within him covers up the  _ crack _ of his knees against the cool tile.

John is beside him in an instant, catapulted across the space between them with one firm wingbeat. “Damn it, Kreizler.” No idea what to do with the sick panic that rises in his throat, with the million questions he doesn’t know how to ask, doesn’t  _ want _ to ask. Instead, he slips an arm around Laszlo -- just beneath the joint between wing and shoulder -- cradling him. “What have you done to yourself now?”

This close now, with Laszlo’s head lolling against his shoulder, the strong fingers of his good hand clutching at John’s sleeve, the damage is clear. Missing primaries. The feathers lustreless and disarrayed, scars running in bald patches between the shafts. The right wing twists at an improbably, awkward angle -- wrenched upward and twisting away.

Old wounds.

“Laszlo.” His name is no more than a whisper, a prayer murmured as John strokes his fingers through loose hair, feeling the outbreak of cold sweat prickling at Laszlo’s temples. “Love, what happened to you?”

“I…” Laszlo’s eyes are black holes of pain, grey-faced and panting. Lost to the bright firework flashes of hurt and the sudden, terrible roaring of long-buried memories brought back to life. “ _ Ich habe die Kontrolle verloren _ .”

“I don’t understand.” John clutches him closer, rocking them both back and forth. His knees groan against the tile. “Laszlo, I don’t understand.”

“I lost control.”

“You…” John cannot even begin to fathom it. Questions upon questions upon horrors circle through his mind -- the shivering, charcoal-dark slump of Laszlo’s wings, the wasted twisting of his right arm. What little he understands. “You have wings. I thought you said --”

That drags a rueful, disgusted laugh from Laszlo. “I have said a great many things. Not all of them entirely honest.” Drawing on what strength there is in his battered, exhausted bones, he struggles upright in John’s arms, tries to force himself to his feet.

Even the small motion is enough to jostle the old breaks, to tear at scar tissue and send him crumpling back to the floor. It is only John’s arms around him that seem to hold him up, to keep him from shattering upon the ground.

“Easy --  _ easy _ , Laszlo.” John wrestles him into stillness, grappling for fistfuls of Laszlo’s jacket to pull the smaller man against his chest. As Laszlo breathes through the pain, eyelashes fluttering against his pale cheeks, John risks smoothing a palm over the quivering of his secondary triceps, tracing the crooked arch of the right wing. “You’re holding yourself too tightly,” he murmurs. “Your muscles --”

“Are atrophied,” Laszlo supplies. “And mostly scar tissue.”

When John touches him it seems as though he might shake apart, a million little points of agony lighting up beneath his skin. But John’s deft fingers are gentle, guiding his wings into a more comfortable position, massaging the painful knots of muscle and sore tendons in his shoulders.

Focused on the shallow rise-and-fall of Laszlo’s breath, John presses his lips to the curve of his ear. “When was the last time you aired your wings?”

Eleven years old. Staring into the vanity mirror -- arm withered, wings crooked and molting fledgling down -- and thinking,  _ at least now the outside matches the inside _ . Ruined. Damaged beyond repair. They have shivered halfway into existence a few times since, but Laszlo has never let himself lose control, has never wanted to bear the obvious wounds of his history for curious eyes.

“A long time ago.” 

His voice is dull, hollowed-out.

Undeterred, John strokes the backs of his knuckles over the hollow of Laszlo’s spine, just between the meeting of his wings. “It’s no wonder you’re in pain.”

He does not say any of the things he wants to;  _ my poor Laszlo _ and  _ oh, my darling, what has the world done to you _ ? John knows better than to even consider offering Laszlo Kreizler anything close to pity.

Laszlo opens his mouth -- to protest, John is sure -- only to be cut off by the concerned voices of the Institute’s teachers in the corridor.

“Doctor Kreizler?” A matron, tow-headed and turning grey, risks peering around the corner, a worried furrow carved into her brow. “Doctor, is everything --?”

“Everything is fine.” Laszlo, curt, cuts her off. An angry, embarrassed flush blooms across his cheeks to be caught in a moment of such vulnerability, such weakness. Crumpled on the cold floor in the arms of his lover, broken wings splayed out and on display for all to goggle at. “Thank you.” Through gritted teeth, attempting to lever himself upright, he mutters “the children will be alarmed. I have to --”

“The  _ only  _ thing you have to do” John stresses the words fiercely. “Is sit down and explain to me just what the hell is going on here.”

For a moment, Laszlo is quiet. His slender fingers grope for John’s hand, sealing their palms together. “My office,” he manages. “It’s --”

“I know where your office is, Kreizler.”

And really, it is almost more shocking than the crow’s wings sprouting from Laszlo’s back, that the man only offers slight protest -- lets John fuss and comfort and hold him steady, guiding them both upright. A firm arm around his lower back keeps Laszlo’s wings supported, John careful not to step on any trailing flight feathers.

Face white with pain, Laszlo is still too damnably proud to admit to weakness, to risk letting the students see him hurting and wretched. With John supporting his weight, the alienist grits his teeth and together they limp a slow path down the corridor, back toward the privacy of Laszlo’s office.

It is a spacious room but, packed wall-to-wall with bookshelves and psychiatric detritus and two grown men with full wingspans, everything seems to Laszlo suddenly and frighteningly claustrophobic. Somehow, he manages to break away from John, to stumble the last few steps to his chair. John lingers at the door, turning the lock. 

With wings splayed out to either side, sprawling across the floor and unwilling to be supported any longer, Laszlo turns glassy eyes on John, considering. “Curious, isn’t it.” There is a strange faintness to his voice, a distance. “The pain. It is always there, even when the wings are incorporeal. Like a phantom limb.”

“How…?”

John can’t quite bring himself to ask.

Unconscious of the gesture, Laszlo tucks his right arm closer, folds his fingers around the hinge of his throbbing elbow. “You know how, John.”

“Your father.”

A single, sharp nod; Laszlo’s mouth drawn into a tight grimace. “The bones in our wings are hollow, like a bird’s, otherwise the weight would be too great -- we would be physically unbalanced and without the capacity for flight. A fledgling’s bones are particularly delicate.” 

John sucks in a harsh breath.

“Twisting my arm caused fractures in the radius, the humerus, and the ulna.” Laszlo touches each point in turn. It is easier like this; to lose himself in a lecture, to make the facts distant, scientific things. “Shoving me down the staircase shattered the bones of my wings and tore several of the muscles in such a way that they have never healed properly.”

There is so much shame, heavy in his broken bones. It drags at the tips of his wings -- dull, uncared for, mangled -- and curves the proud line of his spine, threatens to shatter in his voice. Laszlo’s umber eyes trace the patterns of the carpeting, unwilling to look back at John, to see the disgust writ across his face, the horror. Or, worse, pity.

Instead, as he always does, John reaches out his hand to close the yawning divide between them. He tangles his fingers in the long, curling strands of hair at the nape of Laszlo’s neck to trace the knob of his skull. Just a small, tender touch, but it is enough to quiet the maelstrom of anguish and agony that rises up in Laszlo’s heart.

The deft, fine artist’s fingers trail their way along his spine, finding the juncture of shoulder and wing. And John, taking another step across the distance Laszlo tries to build, asks “do you have preening oil?”

“I…” Laszlo’s head snaps up at once, his eyes wide. “John.”

“ _ Laszlo _ .” John matches his tone, meets him look-for-look, before he softens. Brushes a thumb across the swell of Laszlo’s cheek. “You can say no.”

He hesitates.

And Laszlo  _ knows  _ that it is absurd that he should be so embarrassed about something as simple as grooming when he has regularly spent nights tangled together with John in the large four-poster bed, engaged in far more blush-worthy pursuits. But still, it is one thing for John to see his underdeveloped, lopsided arm and to kiss the crook of his elbow, his palm, the curve of his shoulder and tell him he has no reason to be ashamed. It is a different beast entirely, to let John see the true extent of his wreckage, to let him  _ care _ .

Preening. Such a frighteningly intimate gesture.

“No.” Laszlo, quiet, lets his eyes slide upward, sees the way John falters ever-so-slightly. He softens; it had not been a denial. “There may be a supply in the infirmary. It is hard on the children, after all, when they start to grow in their adult plumage, but...”

“No matter.” John circles the chair, mindful of stray feathers, to stroke the slack, frail musculature of Laszlo’s dark wings. He will not leave him for a second. Laszlo gives a full-bodied shiver at the touch. “Is this all right?”

With his hands wrapped, white-knuckled around the arms of the chair, Laszlo manages a small noise of assent at the back of his throat.

He cannot see the way John smiles, the way his golden eyes shine at the trust Laszlo bestows upon him. But he is acutely aware of the warm hands on his shoulders, of the kiss John presses to the back of his head -- of all the kindness and concern and tender love that John Moore has forever been willing to offer him.

“Tell me if I hurt you.” 

A fragile breath and then, so softly that John almost misses it: “I’m not certain you could.”

John doesn’t think he can remember the last time someone had such unshakeable faith in him. Isn’t sure anyone else ever  _ has _ .

He traces the arch of Laszlo’s wings with each hand, weighing his next steps. The left wing seems to have suffered the least damage -- a parallel to Kreizler’s mismatched arms -- and John begins his work here. It is a slow effort; combing the shafts to lie flat, straightening tangled vanes into smoothness. 

Meticulous, John works his way first through the small converts, working down toward the forearms-length shadows of his primaries. His fingertips find broken barbs and bent shafts, all the tender spots that make Laszlo grimace and twist away. And, massaging more gently, he buries his fingers in the softness of Laszlo’s underwings to make his toes curl, his wintips flutter. Laszlo rolls his spine appreciatively.

And John has always loved this, more than anything. The rare opportunities where Laszlo risks lowering his defenses, letting down his guard just enough to bare another small fraction of his soul to John.

There is not another soul in the world that knows Laszlo Kreizler like this; all of the intimate details, the vulnerabilities and hard edges of this aloof, closed-off man.

In the privacy of the bedroom at 283 East 17th Street, they have explored one another, examined all of their idiosyncracies at length. He has learned the softness of Laszlo’s pale skin, the constellations of ginger freckles and how easily a kiss can make him blush. With the sheets twisted around them, John has mapped out the sweetest spots along Laszlo’s ribs, the backs of his knees, the vulnerable place behind his ear that makes him bite his lips and squirm.

Carding his fingers through a particularly thorny collection of secondary flight feathers, John frees broken shafts between his fingers. The sound that catches at the back of Laszlo’s throat is something like a quiet, profound relief.

“No one…” Laszlo clears his throat. Tries again as he leans, slack-limbed, into John’s touch -- hot with a bashful vulnerability. “No one has ever…”

John knows.

No one has ever cared for Laszlo Kreizler like this; preened his wings and kissed him and held him through his hurts. He has not been loved, not the way he had needed as a boy, not the way he had craved as a man. Too many touches throughout his life had brought with them nothing but pain; John can still see in his mind’s eye the way Laszlo had flinched, the white edge of fear that had grown around his dark eyes the first time he had taken the dear, beloved face into his hands, drawn him close enough to kiss him.

“I will.” John whispers the promise in Laszlo’s ear, punctuates it with a kiss. His barred blue-and-black wings unfurl across the span of Laszlo’s own, blanketing him. “You only have to ask it of me, Laszlo.”

A truth he has demonstrated time and time again; he would do anything if Laszlo asked. Would take away all his aches and hurts and old, unfair wounds if he could. The most he can manage is a brief respite.

In the stillness, with the shrieking of children beyond the windows, John alternates between long strokes of his palms along Laszlo’s wingspan and dotting kisses in a crown atop his head. With each breath, he is aware of the way Laszlo melts -- like softened candle wax, slumping in the chair, soft eyelashes resting longer and longer against his cheeks.

He will hide his wings away again when he wakes, will pull the mantle of control firmly about himself once more. Stevie will take them home in the calash. And, only when they are mounting the steps on 17th Street will Laszlo offer John a quiet, uncertain “thank you.”

Perhaps -- John dares to hope -- Laszlo might let the mask slip away a little more often. When it is just the pair of them, contented and comfortable in the study, curled together in the expanse of Laszlo’s bed, perhaps he will consider airing his wings again.

For now, John smudges a thumb across the curve of his cheek, arranges Laszlo’s slender limbs into a more comfortable configuration, and lets him sleep.

 


End file.
